1) Field of the Invention
The subject invention relates to a method of retrieving information associated with an object present in a media stream without editing the media stream.
2) Description of Related Art
Society is increasingly becoming tired of traditional advertising and corporations are striving to find new methods of conveying information about their products. One example of the new methods of advertising is disclosed in the article entitled Tuned In, which appeared in the August 2003 issue of AMERICAN Way. The article describes a viewer of a NASCAR race being able to interact with his favorite drivers competing in the race from his own living room or being able to allow the user to order items directly through their television and have it delivered to their home. One problem with the general ideas described in the article is the cost required for providing such services and time and effort required to establish these capabilities. To date, the industry has been unable to provide a method of providing this functionality that is cost effective and that does not require extreme time and effort.
There are various methods of interacting with a media stream to obtain information, such as providing limited services. An example of such a method is disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,002,394 and U.S. patent application No. 20030005445, both to Schein et al. These references disclose an invention practiced under WebTV®, hereinafter referred to as interactive TV. The interactive TV provides a television schedule and information guide, which allows interaction between a television viewer and information associated with a television program. Two-way communication is established with an on-line internet provider. The on-line internet provider is used to provide information from broadcast stations and advertisers. The on-line internet provider supplies information concerning the television program, actors, products related to the program, etc. in a product window. The link to the information is established between the information and the program itself. The information is only unique to the program the viewer chooses to select. However, this method only provides superficial information to the viewer and the information is not being directly associated with objects in the media streams. Therefore, they have avoided expending great resources to establish their interactive television. This type of method is also commonly provided by digital cable and satellite providers.
Other methods allow for creating hot spots for an object within a media stream and retrieving information associated with the object upon selecting the hot spot. However, each of the methods known to those skilled in the art require editing of individual frames of the media stream, which requires a significant outlay of the time and effort to establish such methods. Therefore, this technology has been slow to develop within the industry and very few would consider undertaking such a method. One method shown U.S. Pat. Nos. 5,708,845 and 6,496,981, both to Wistendahl et al., discloses creating hot spots for objects present in a media stream and associating information for the objects to the hot spots. This allows a user to select the hot spot to access the associated information. Each of the '845 and the '981 patents requires editing of individual frames of the media stream to create the hot spots for the objects. It is well known to those skilled in the art to define hot spots using positional data having two or three coordinates.
However, one issue presented in creating these hot spots is interleaving it with the media stream. Faced with this issued, these references disclose transmitting the hot spots in video blanking intervals (VBI) associated with the media stream. In other words, if the video is being transmitted at 30 frames per second, only about 22 frames actually contain the media stream. This leaves 8 frames that are considered blank and one or two of these individual frames receives the hot spot data. Since the frames are passing at such a rate, the user or viewer upon seeing the hot spot and wishing to select it, will select it for a long enough period of time such that a blank frame having the hot spot data will pass during this period. The '845 patent and the '981 patent additionally disclose editing only selected frames of the media stream, instead of editing each of the individual frames. However, even if two frames per second were edited, for a half-hour media stream, 3,600 frames would have to be edited. This would take considerable time and effort even for a most skilled editor.
Another method disclosed in U.S. Pat. No. 6,154,771 to Rangan et al. incorporates hyperlinks into a media stream. The hyperlinks are created by a service provider and are edited into the individual frames of the media stream. The media stream is parsed and displayed as an array of static images for the user to see a past history of the media stream. Editing the individual frames, as mentioned above, requires significant time, skill, and effort and is a major burden to be overcome in providing this functionality to users and viewers in a cost effective manner.
These related art methods are characterized by one or more inadequacies. Accordingly, it would be advantageous to provide a method that overcomes these inadequacies by retrieving information for an object without editing the media stream. More specifically, it would be advantageous to provide these user-selectable regions, hot spots, or hyperlinks, without editing individual frames of the media stream such that it is economical and efficient.